Mbah Maridjan was the sultan's representative to the spirits atop the volcano on the Indonesian island of Java, where an eruption claimed a dozen victims in the small village of Kinahrejo on Tuesday.

His charred body was discovered in an attitude of prayer, according to an announcement by the present Sultan of Yogyakarta, an Indonesian province to the south of Mt. Merapi. He was 83 years old.

"My job is to stop lava from flowing down," Mbah Maridjan told the Jakarta Post in an interview last August. "Let the volcano breathe, but not cough."

His record up to then had been pretty good. Appointed to the job of gatekeeper in 1983 by then-Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX, Mbah Maridjan had survived previous eruptions that volcanologists had warned could have been much worse.

Mt. Merapi's smoking cone—Merapi means "mountain of fire" in Javanese—lay within a few miles of his home, but Mbah Maridjan insisted on staying put when the Indonesian government ordered an evacuation in 2006.

He refused to leave Merapi, even while conceding in interviews that he might be killed there. The threatened eruption never materialized, and his already high prestige as a prognosticator rose.

The volcano has long been revered as home to a spiritual kingdom. Eruptions have been interpreted by Javanese as punishments for offending the spirits. Mbah Maridjan organized an annual ceremony in which offerings including clothing, perfume and cigarettes were sacrificed at shrines on the mountain.

A kind of bridge between Indonesia's spiritual past and the future, Mbah Maridjan talked with spirits, worried about the environment and had a Facebook account.

In recent years, the spirits had become angry over excessive logging and sand quarrying on the slopes of Mt. Merapi, he said.

"We should stop making nature suffer through our destructive behavior," he told the Jakarta Post in 2006. The mountain's rumblings also sometimes seemed to people in Java to prefigure political change, including an eruption in 1997 that preceded the resignation of longtime Indonesian President Suharto.

Even as he clashed with government scientists over evacuations, Mbah Maridjan—Mbah is an honorific term, meaning, roughly, "grandfather"—became a revered figure. Politicians asked for his blessing at election time. He appeared in advertisements for a popular line of herbal beverages.

"Everybody sought his support and claimed to be associated with him," including fundamentalist Muslims and opponents of the Sultan, said Judith Schlehe, an anthropologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. "I see him as an interesting figure symbolizing the tensions between many interests in present-day Java."

Mbah Maridjan tended to cattle and maintained shrines on the volcano while receiving a modest government stipend.

Thousands turned out for his funeral on Thursday, when he was buried next to the previous gatekeeper, his father, in the family plot two miles from his home village.

"We knew long ago that Mbah Maridjan would be taken by Merapi," said a spokesman for the sultan. "Now he's gone, we have to choose a new gatekeeper soon."

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